A pro-Trump wellness influencer and a suburban Democrat share a conspiracy theory - how did it spread so far?
www.bbc.co.uk
Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on
the shooting in July and the
apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the
BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
Dozens of evidence-free posts I found suggesting both incidents were staged have racked up more than 30 million views on X. Some of these posts came from anti-Trump accounts that did not seem to have a track record of sharing theories like this, while a smaller share were posted by some of the former president’s supporters.
For Democrat Camille, Trump’s team orchestrated this to boost his chances of winning the election.
Wild Mother - who already follows QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory which claims Donald Trump is involved in a secret war against an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping
philes - wants to believe Trump’s own team staged the attack in order to frame his supposed enemies in the "Deep State".
The Deep State is claimed to be a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services looking to thwart certain politicians.
There is no evidence to support either of the women’s theories.
The idea that news events have been staged to manipulate the public is a classic trope in the conspiracy theory playbook. Wild Mother says she is no stranger to this alternative way of thinking.
Camille, however, says this is the first time she has ever used the word "staged" about an event in the news like this. She always believed Covid-19 was real and she was extremely opposed to false claims the 2020 election had been rigged.
But on 13 July this year, when she was sitting in front of her TV at home watching live as Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, she says she immediately thought: "Oh, that's staged."
The way Donald Trump was able to pose for a photo and raise his fist in the air was what ignited Camille’s suspicions.
She had questions about how the US Secret Service allowed the shooting to happen in the first place. The director of the service has since resigned over failings that day.
The shooter was a 20-year-old called Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service snipers. His motives remain unknown – which left many questions wide open. And so Camille’s thoughts continued to spiral.
Already sceptical that something did not add up, Camille turned to X for more answers. In the years before the shooting, she had already started spending more and more time on the social media site, formerly known as Twitter. She had taken an interest in pro-Democrat anti-Trump accounts and followed some of them.
"I would admit to you that I spend too much time on social media now, and it, in my mind, is kind of a problem," she tells me.
Recent changes to how X’s "For You" feed works meant she started seeing more posts from accounts she does not follow, but that pushed ideas in line with her political views. Lots of these accounts had also purchased blue ticks on the site, which give their posts more prominence.
So when the first assassination attempt happened, unfounded conspiracy theories suggesting it had been staged were not only recommended directly to her feed - but were all the more convincing as they came from other profiles with the same political views she holds about Donald Trump.
Most of the social media companies say they have guidelines to protect users and reduce harmful content. X did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.
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I don't know what the heck this is supposed to be from the BBC.
I think it's mostly an attack on X and how Americans get their news?
Or have I missed something and the 'staged assassination' thing is now either mainstream or has some credibility?
As far as I'm aware, they're both obviously assassination attempts and this is just batshit weirdness?
Can anyone shed some light on what's going on with the discourse over there? Is this article representative, or just nonsense?
[NOTE FOR MODS: the censored word was included in the original article]
